![]() ![]() Using the Apple Watch Series 4 ECG app in conjunction with the Apple Health iOS app. High heart rates may be caused by exercise, stress, alcohol, dehydration, infection or AFib itself. Low heart rates are common among fit, athletic individuals, but can also be caused by certain medications. But it also states that heart rates under 50 or over 120 beats per minute can affect the app's ability to check for AFib, leading to inconclusive results. These irregular rhythm features aren't for everyoneĪpple's main disclaimer about the ECG app is that it should only be used by people 22 years old or above. As Apple's website states: The ECG app can't detect a heart attack, blood clots, stroke or other heart-related conditions, including high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, high cholesterol or other forms of arrhythmia. The Apple Watch can only detect irregular heart rhythms, which are a risk factor for stroke. "The answer is a resounding and unequivocal NO!" Pearson responded via his blog, The Skeptical Cardiologist. Pearson, the cardiologist, asking whether the Apple Watch could help detect a future heart attack in her husband, who had already had one at age 36. AFib is the only heart issue the ECG app can detectĪ woman recently wrote to Dr. However, even these mobile monitors typically use two to three leads and run continuously over days, weeks or even months, says Murthy. (Doctors in the US usually call them EKGs, but it's the same thing, an electrocardiogram.) They use electrodes placed on different parts of the body to evaluate the heart's electrical activity in three directions (right to left, up and down, and front to back), which provides a clearer picture of its movement through the heart's four chambers.īecause AFib is known to come and go, if it's not present during an appointment, a doctor may ask a patient to wear a simplified version of the 12-lead ECG at home so they can monitor their heart rhythms over a longer period of time. To properly diagnose when someone is in AFib, doctors use 12-lead ECG machines. In the younger population, if they don't have two or more risk factors then identifying them is nice but it's not going to prevent a stroke."ĬNET Senior Editor Vanessa Hand Orellana gets hooked up to a 12-lead ECG. "But we have to have a highly sensitive and specific way of doing it. Anthony Pearson, a Missouri-based board-certified cardiologist. "I'm an advocate of identifying asymptomatic atrial fibrillation, especially in high-risk populations," says Dr. You can read some of the comments from the medical community here, here and here. ![]() Especially when that technology is still so new and based on studies that haven't been published in peer-reviewed journals. ![]() Venkatesh Murthy, professor of preventive cardiology at the University of Michigan, estimates that 90% of irregular rhythm alerts in younger groups are false alarms.Īs a result, experts worry that putting Apple's screening technology on the wrists of millions of people who are likely to be young and healthy could increase the risk of overtreatment. This means that with the right software, training and so on, the hardware needed is accessible and affordable.And because most of the AFib and stroke prevention studies have focused on the older populations who are most at risk, even less is known about the value of screening for AFib in healthy individuals under age 65. Hsieh went on, ‘One unique aspect of this study was a semi-supervised deep learning algorithm, heuristic pre-training.’ This meant that while previous studies of artificial intelligence in medicine typically used over 100,000 labels, this study ‘achieved high accuracy using only 6,338 ECGs by pre-training the neural network to approximate a heuristic, the average difference between successive heart rate measurements across different window sizes, previously used in the medical literature.’ The details are described in this presentation paper. The attachment, by the way, is the Kardia Band which costs around $200. Cardiogram and DeepHeart had 98% sensitivity and 90% specificity compared to the attachment which managed 93% sensitivity and 84% specificity. By using software to transform ordinary wearables into personal health monitors, we can literally save lives.’Īccording to Johnson Hsieh, the app’s other co-founder, the sensitivity and specificity of DeepHeart were higher than an Apple Watch ECG attachment that has been cleared by the FDA. Cardiogram co-founder Brandon Ballinger commented, ‘Atrial fibrillation with affect one in four of us during our lifetime, causes a quarter of all strokes and is frequently undiagnosed. ![]()
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